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Expose Metacity With Expocity
ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."
Why not just say "Expose effect for Metacity" instead of beating around the bush.
Call a spade a spade.
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I have 8 virtual desktops. I know whats on each of them. Alt-1 gets me to my email and general web browser. Alt-2 has my IRC client. Alt-3 has a gnome-console with a tab to the servers I want to keep an eye on. Alt-4 has some statistical analysis I'm working on. Alt-5 is my web development screen. And so on. Xmms is set to stick on all screens, and is shrunk to mini-view up at the top.
Within each virtual screen its easy to find the application I want - in the web dev screen I might have a Mozilla window, and Opera window, an emacs windows, and a Gimp window, but its easy to find the one I want.
I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot. Oh well.
Baz
So the reason "Linux is losing the desktop race" is because the very people who are currently trying to improve the linux desktop experience aren't making cool stuff for windows instead?
At home, I use OSX 10.3, and Expose is one of my favourite features of 10.3, which I use most often. Now, with Expose-like functionality on Metacity, I can have the same kind of comfort on my computer at work (where I use GNU/Linux with Gnome as desktop environment and - of course - Metacity as window manager). This will definitely improve my workflow.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Yeah, good. Maybe now I'll fire up Linux again, instead of just working with OS X. If you have worked with Expose, you don't want anything else. It feels so natural.
;-)
Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
I'm NOT an Apple zealot or apologist, I actually like Linux more than OS X (and don't like Windows at all) and have used Linux for far more than I used OS X.
So, please, show me some URLs to OSS projects that you think are really innovative and are not copies of commercial initiatives. Please restore my faith in OSS
Well, basically everybody copies features from everyone else. That's business.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I am here to tell you that is exactly why Linux is losing the desktop race.
Please don't tell people who are volunteering their time writing open source applications that their time would be better spent elsewhere. The reason Linux is as close to where it is on the desktop is because people have worked on the sort of things that interest them. You may be right: Maybe some other project would be more objectively useful. But on the other hand, if you were in charge, deciding who got to work on what project, nobody would want to work on open-source anymore, and Linux would suck pretty quick.
So let people do what they want, even if you think it's dumb. It's a community effort that is strong because people can work when, how, and on what they want.
Do you hang out at neighborhood cleanups telling people they should be volunteering their time at soup kitchens instead?
No offense but if you are manually doing this, you need to write some simple automation scripts in shell or perl to handle rolling out "releases" or updates like this.
I've managed and done procedures like this on large clusters before and it was all managed via a small set of scripts and config files that made huge system changes or code rollouts as simple as a couple of shell commands.
--- I do not moderate.
Yep, using the same definition of innovation as Microsoft, you're right.
Copy your ideas from Apple, give it a slightly different finish and not do it as well, and then have it named "innovative."
Bloody brilliant.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
The average desktop user barely understands the concept of files and folders - do you honestly expect them to be organized enough to arrange their programs into virtual desktops as you have done?
This project is exactly what Linux should be doing - assimilating the best features from its competitors on the desktop. I just wish that Linux was also innovating on the desktop, rather than just following in the footsteps of others (and no, themability is not an innovation so far as usability is concerned).
Are you a troll, or were you just shortchanged on brains? Metacity copied it from Apple, not the other way around.
I know that lots of readers here believe that they should be able to copy ideas from other peoples software and make an open source or free alternative, but does this kind of blantant copying harm the cause?
I would rather see innovation from the Linux and open source commnuitities that doesn't merely try to implement what other companies are already doing.
Apple deserve much praise for their recent work on OS X in my opinion. Simply duplicating work that they've invested time, money and effort in research and development.
It think this dilutes their efforts. Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery.
Only because Microsoft uses "innovative" in every other word in their marketing speak.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Maybe usefull on the Apple desktop but as a long time X user I and other have learned to utilize more than one workspace (virtual desktops). I wouldn't stand having everytning on one desktop and in the end not knowing where I had anything.
Interesting if you flip this around:
Maybe useful on an X desktop, but as a long-time Mac user I and others have learned to make full use of a single desktop. I wouldn't stand having everything scattered over multiple virtual desktops and, in the end, not knowing where I had anything.
Really, it's all about what you're comfortable with. Why not have both? There are many advantages to each approach.
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And there was me thinking that it was Enlightnment's pager (which has done the same thing for several years now - move the mouse over a small version of a window in the pager and it'll zoom out a larger picture, click on it and get taken to the window... and you can move windows around in the pager, even between desktops)
Academic or commercial, good point. Especially since a lot of academic innovations end up in OSS.
;-)
VM and scheduler good example, *but* really innovative or just a new way of implementing an old idea?
Brings me to the next question, when is something innovative....
A *really hard* question
There's no hurry. The desktop market isn't going anywhere.
Right now, we're seeing the catastrophic takeover of the server market by Linux, it's devastating the vendors Unix offerings, Microsoft will be next, all that will be left for non Linux systems will be a few small niches and long term holdouts.
The desktop market is really no different, the same will happen there too. Like the server switch it really is inevitable and has been for years. Purely a matter of time now.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
For example, Python has evolved into an extremely intuitive yet powerful programming language. :-)
Perl was also fairly new in its time.
There's GNU Emacs which is one of the most powerful text editors in existence.
There's the Apache Webserver. Although webservers aren't new, I would hardly call Apache a copy of anything.
I'm not sure whether the first publicly-released blog software was open source, but I think it might have been.
OpenBSD was, AFAIK, the first secure-by-default modern Unix system.
Linux (the kernel) has also done (or been modified to do) several things not done before.
X11 started as a project out of MIT (which I would guess was open-source, even though the phrase hadn't been coined yet.)
GNU readline is also something that is exclusive to open source
I'd guess that ls --color was something new to free software, as well, just because I douby anyone with a pure profit motive would consider it worth the time to implement.
The Debian Project has made several innovations in operating system integration.
Anyway, there are plenty of examples. You just have to look.
Alt-tab is fine if you have a few windows open at once, but it doesn't scale well. Try it with 20 or so windows and it starts to get annoying.
If you have multiple similar windows open (say a load of gimp documents, or gvim windows), you have to cycle through each one, read the title on the task list and remember to stop cycling on the right one (or use shift-alt-tab to go back, a strange combination).
Alt-tab works, but it's inefficient. I generally split my work over many desktops to avoid having to use it too much. The expose^Hity method seems a good alternative.
I'll take "Features Enlightenment Had 3 Years Ago" for $100, Alex.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
-T
enlightenment had this really nifty live-icon box. It would (expensively, but then that's par for E-wm course) scan each window contents and display a scaled down version in the icon box. Click on an icon to focus, or switch desktop.
Expose is like a temporary, full screen, icon box.
At least that's what I thought before I saw it in action. Regardless of whether the idea is innovative, it is extremely well engineered, from a HCI perspective. Slick, pretty, AND easy to use.